I've been reading up on #Bluesky, and it isn't what I thought. As far as I can tell (please correct me if you know otherwise), it an open source federated social media platform.
It runs on a protocol called #ATProtocol, as opposed to #ActivityPub (#Mastodon and friends).
Other Fedi protocols include #Diaspora, DFRN (#Friendica), Zot (#Hubzilla), or Nomad (#Streams).
However, bridge services are needed for Bluesky/Mastodon federation, and there's mostly just one big Bluesky instance.
@dynamic yes correct. They are supposed to federate on their protocol but it is telling that there are no other instances I know of yet after all this time. I know that posting to them is a bit complex via the API so not sure if that counts at all.
Yet they draw crowds of new users.
Drawing crowds of new users does not surprise me at all. I don't *understand* it, but it feels like it's literally always the way these things go : (
Regarding multiple instances, @BeAware seems to indicate that there may actually *be* many instances, but we just can't tell because they are all under the same domain. Not sure how much of a problem that presents, but there's definitely a creepiness to it.
Ah, perhaps I misunderstood. I had taken a "Personal Data Server" to be analogous to an instance. Given that I've gotten that wrong, I'm guessing that that's really just for one's own data?
Assuming I've gotten that right, does it contain the posts you read, or only the posts you make?
@dynamic @danie10 you have it right there, regarding *only* hosting the data, nothing more. I don't have those fine details regarding exactly which posts, but from my superficial understanding, I think it's only the posts you make, not the media associated with it nor anyone else's. Maybe you can allow other users as well on one single PDS. That I am also unsure of.
However, unlike instances here where we have complete websites hosted on the domain, a PDS domain lands on a small text file just explaining that a PDS is hosted there. No user interface. Those are seperated into the "AppView" part of the infrastructure.
@BeAware @dynamic @danie10 So, correction, *all* of your data has its "original location" at your PDS - all kinds of records (profile, posts, likes, follows, non-Bluesky records like WhiteWind blog posts), "blobs" like attached images, and even videos now. You can even put non-Bsky records like whtwnd posts on your Bluesky-hosted PDS.
They aren't usually directly served from there (data is served from the AppView, media from Bluesky CDN), but they can always be fetched from the original source.
@BeAware @dynamic @danie10 Yeah, there's an artificial limit of 10 accounts right now enforced at the Relay so things don't get out of hand too quickly before shit's fully ready (it can be raised on request, but I think only Bridgy has did that so far).
Oh and one more thing, web UI isn't really integrated with the AppView, it's just a web-based JS client in the same way as Elk is for Mastodon. It's technically not any more privileged that any third party app, it's just "the official one".
@mackuba @dynamic @danie10 Yeah, I explained it that way because I wanted to be as simple as possible.
I'm not sure your average user will understand those differences.
The point was to make clear the AppViews that already exist like Whitewind and Frontpage. I do have that correct, right? Those are AppViews with a web-based JS client attached?
@BeAware @dynamic @danie10 So e.g. @shreyan has his Bluesky account hosted on his own PDS, and here's an image from one of his posts straight from his PDS: https://pds.shreyanjain.net/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.getBlob?did=did:plc:bnqkww7bjxaacajzvu5gswdf&cid=bafkreibz3psvivx53dms35e5hj4ypghez43sz55tazluoserjehpy3ygxm